The Real Adventure eBook

Then, “Oh, I was furious with you an hour ago,”
she went on. “I’d made such a nice,
reasonable, really beautiful plan for you, and given
you a tip about it, and then I sat and watched you
in that thoroughgoing way of yours, kicking it all
to bits. But somehow, when I see you all by yourself,
this way, it changes things. I get to thinking
that perhaps my plan was silly after all—­anyhow,
it was silly to make it. The plan was, of course,
to marry you off to Hermione Woodruff.”

He turned this over in his deliberate way, during
the process of blowing two or three smoke rings, began
gradually to grin, and said at last, “That was
some plan, little sister. How do you think of
things like that? You ought to write romances
for the magazines, that’s what you ought to
do.”

“I don’t know,” she objected.
“If reasonableness counted for anything in things
like that, it was a pretty good plan. It would
have to be somebody like Hermione. You can’t
get on at all with young girls. As long as you
remember they’re around, you’re afraid
to say anything except milk and water out of a bottle
that makes them furious, and then if you forget whom
you’re talking to and begin thinking out loud,
developing some idea or other, you—­simply
paralyze them.

“Well, Hermione’s sophisticated and clever,
she’s lived all over the place; she isn’t
old yet, and she was a brick about that awful husband
of hers—­never made any fuss—­bluffed
it out until he, luckily, died. Of course she’ll
marry again, and I just thought, if you liked the idea,
it might as well be you.”

“I don’t know,” said Rodney, “whether
Mrs. Woodruff knows what she wants or not, but I do.
She wants a run for her money—­a big house
to live in three months in the year, with a flock
of servants and a fleet of motor-cars, and a string
of what she’ll call cottages to float around
among, the rest of the time. And she’ll
want a nice, tame, trick husband to manage things
for her and be considerate and affectionate and amusing,
and, generally speaking, Johnny-on-the-spot whenever
she wants him. If she has sense enough to know
what she wants in advance, it will be all right.
She can take her pick of dozens. But if she gets
a sentimental notion in her head—­and I’ve
a hunch that she’s subject to them—­that
she wants a real man, with something of his own to
do, there’ll be, saving your presence, hell
to pay. And if the man happened to be me ...!”

Frederica stretched her slim arms outward. Thoughtful-faced,
she made no comment on his analysis of the situation,
unless a much more observant person than Rodney might
have imagined there was one in the deliberate way
in which she turned her rings, one at a time, so that
the brilliant masses of gems were inside, and then
clenched her hands over them.

He had got up and was ranging comfortably up and down
the room.

“I know I look more or less like a nut to the
people who’ve always known us—­father’s
and mother’s friends, and most of their children.
But I give you my word, Freddy, that most of them
look like nuts to me. Why, they live in curiosity
shops—­so many things around, things they
have and things they’ve got to do, that they
can’t act or think for fear of breaking something.